A wide range of law reform initiatives are underway around the world. These projects aim to make legal systems more fair, efficient and responsive. They also seek to increase legal access and reduce the power of powerful stakeholders such as governments and large businesses.
Often, what begins as a technical change has unforeseen consequences for society. This can be the case of codification (the collection and systematic arrangement, usually by subject, of laws in a legal system) or changes to the way courts work such as the elimination of class action lawsuits and the reform of discovery and pre-arraignment detention (“desk appearance ticket”) reform.
Another example of unintended consequence comes from structural reforms that are designed to improve a court’s ideological balance or efficiency. But increasing the number of seats on the Supreme Court, for instance, will not close the gap between those who see a high degree of interpretive determinacy in legal texts and those who see less. Similarly, adding or removing term limits will not resolve the underlying interpretive dispute.
To achieve its true ambition, legal reform must find ways to give citizens opportunities to examine their assumptions about what they ask of the law, engage in conversations about where and why those expectations might be unrealistic, and involve them in the hard work of building more just official and unofficial legal systems. Then, perhaps, it will be possible to reduce the chasm between what the law says and what people actually experience as justice.
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